Wednesday, September 7, 2016

The Black Hack: Awesome.

A while back I reviewed The Front by Mark Hunt, a WW2 RPG using a really cool, simple hack of OSR rules. I praised the hell out of it. In doing so, I gave Mark Hunt a lot of credit for stuff I thought he came up with. Actually, The Front is based almost entirely on The Black Hack by David Black. The Front is still awesome, don't get me wrong - it's a solid, engaging piece of work. But all that I attributed to the genius of Mark Hunt I should have attributed to David Black. I'm a big fan of this ultra-simple, streamlined, elegant version of old-school tabletop roleplaying. Here's a helpful "SRD" of the text that anyone can use, without permission, to do whatever they want. Just like Mark Hunt did so very well.

I can't say for certain, but the next time I run "D&D" I'm almost positive it's going to be this. It's a liberating re-imagining of the basics of the system, keeping the terminology and spirit but turning the basic procedures on their heads.